Efficiency and transparency are generally among the goals in designing a bridge between different protocols. Labeling either of the disparate protocols the “source” protocol and the other the “target” protocol, one metric of efficiency is the bridge's ability to utilize all features of the source protocol—instead of a limited subset. Another metric of bridge efficiency is the ability of transactions originated in the source protocol to utilize features of the target protocol. Transparency of a bridge means that transactions originated in a source protocol and do not require knowledge of the bridge; if a bridge is fully transparent to a source protocol there is no difference between transactions that will be carried by the bridge and transactions remaining within the source protocol.
However, conventional bridge design generally requires trade-offs and compromises between the goals of efficiency and transparency. As one example, transparency generally requires a bridge to have fixed translation rules. The requirement that translation rules applied by a conventional bridge be fixed to maintain bridge transparency generally means that the conventional bridge provides for only a basic, fixed subset of the target protocol features. Selection of this basic, fixed subset of the target protocol features requires making significant trade-offs that can be a difficult and time consuming task.